Adam ran quickly down the spiral staircase, his mind seemed to be in a faraway place, but his body was on these stairs with one sole mission: To escape alive. While his heart beating violently said to the child: "Run, Adam! Run! And never stop running!"

Finally, Adam reached the bottom, but there was no apparent way out, just a white wooden wall at the end of the stairs. Adam violently hit the wooden wall that blocked the exit, trying to open it. However, it didn't budge, and instead, the head of a girl with stars decorating her face formed on the wall.

The girl looked at Adam, who was quite startled, and said in a very calming voice:

—You should calm down before you leave...

Adam stared at the girl as if she were crazy for a while. She probably knew what the boy had just been through. 'How could she ask him to calm down?' Adam's heart screamed, but the fear in the boy's mind told him to stay quiet and go along with it, just as his godfather had instructed him to do.

The girl noticed that Adam seemed to calm down over time and continued in her soothing voice:

—Alright, young librarian, try to honor your kind and stay calm. Good librarians stay calm until the end of their lives. Emotions will only get you lost inside books, boy...

Adam looked at the girl with fear, but his breathing slowly returned to normal.

—Now listen carefully...— the girl continued calmly —When the door opens, leave calmly. If the other bookshelves notice anything odd, they'll kill you.

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Before Adam could react to the terrible situation he had gotten himself into, the wooden wall began to disappear, and a wooden frame appeared in its place, showing the aisle. The girl kissed Adam on the cheek and whispered in his ear:

—You're the boy who accompanied the hermit to infinity, I know you can do it... it's just another walk among the bookshelves, kid.

Adam found himself in the aisle of another floor. He had never been here before, but judging by the number of stairs he had descended, he knew it was the middle floor of the third level. The boy wanted to run, but his mind stopped him. Now he had to go with the flow to stay alive. If his body fought against it, he would be torn apart and transformed into a book.

With shaky steps due to nerves, Adam began to walk through the aisles surrounded by books. These aisles filled with seemingly endless books had never seemed so strange to him. But little by little, Adam gained confidence as he saw that nothing happened, and he managed to reach the stairs of the third floor.

These marble stairs had never seemed so peculiar to the young boy. As he descended the stairs and distanced himself from the hellish experience, Adam's heart beat rapidly, and his breathing accelerated.

Today was the first time in his life that Adam realized how claustrophobic these stairs could be. Each step made the boy feel like the stairs were becoming narrower and narrower, as if the walls were going to crush his body.

However, as his childish mind deceived him with each step, each step also brought him closer to his destination. Despite the heaviness he felt with each step, Adam remembered the madness of the old beggar: one wrong question, one wrong move, and they killed him. However, the tranquility he felt was so overwhelming that Adam thought the long path to the void was just a stroll through the aisles.

For the first time in his life, at the tender age of twelve, Adam felt depressed. No matter how hard he tried, the boy couldn't take the next step to keep descending the endless, cold marble stairs. But it wasn't because of fear. It was because of the question his heart was answering: no matter how many robes Adam obtained, how many languages he mastered, and how many books he read, the young hero felt that he could never achieve what that old man achieved barefoot and dressed in rags.